but can it help getting you into a better MBA program than before? all else constant…
from what I’ve heard and seen, very little if at all
I doubt it, because most schools are looking for leadership potential.
^This. From what I’ve read B-Shools view it as a professional designation, which it is. It gives them confidence you can handle the quantitative work, but that’s it.
Below is from an admission consultant from Wal Street Oasis’ board. So maybe it’ll help you get into a USC type school but not Chicago or Wharton.
It depends on what you want to do. If you are interested in being a fundamental equity analyst, some shops will not care if you are an MBA or not – in fact, in some places, it’s considered a waste of time (when I was at Barclays Global Investors, they had no time for MBAs, but BlackRock has more stockpicking). Also, if you are in fixed income do you really need a CFA or would you do better to get a Master of Financial Engineering? The MBA degree has many, many benefits: leadership, networking, and 2 years of what may feel like camp. But the CFA is very marketable as well. Once, I actually saw a professor in a Stanford GSB defer to a CFA in an investment management class. I also saw someone who never would have gotten into any business school because he barely graduated from college get into several mid-tier business schools because he had cleaned up his act and earned his CFA. (and is now in fixed income asset mgt)
so what does this tell you? It’s up to you and what you want to do. More doors will open for you with the MBA, but it really depends, as you alluded to in your original post, on how deep you want to go. What’s your dream role?
The CFA in and of itself does ont help much at all. Schools want to see a lot of team accomplishment in addition to individual accomplishment. Even if you’ve cleared the CFA, the people that have done years in banking or private equity will probably have better corporate finance and modeling skills than you anyway, so from an MBA admissions standpoint, I think the CFA is one of those activities that has pretty low reward-to-effort ratio in my view.
That said, as an alumni interviewer and someone that advises people on how to get into business school, I can tell you a couple things that may be more encouraging. The bright side is that it’s all in a manner of how you spin your accomplishment, and the CFA should help you a lot more once you’re in school rather than getting into school. Here are a couple examples – let’s take the hypothetical question of “Tell me about something important you’ve accomplished in the two years.”
Response #1:“I passed the CFA exam and got my charter. It was really important to me because I studied very hard, and now I know that I can be very good with analyzing financial ratios and someday help manage a portfolio. Best of all, I did it all by myself and I can thank only myself for the hundreds of hours I put into my studies.”
Response #2:“I’m most excited about earning the CFA charter. Obviously it’s helped me in my own career and has led to a significant increase in job responsibilities at my asset management firm. However, the reason I’m most proud is because it’s given me the confidence to mentor the new class of five junior associates. Previously, we had no formal training program and I found through my own experience that I often struggled to get the guidance I needed when I first joined at the firm. Because of that, I wanted to make a difference in the training and mentoring of new associates, and I have used my experience to develop a training program where I teach new hires the basics of corporate finance and accounting during a lunch-and-learn session every Friday. This was all something I developed out of my own initiative. Anyway, it’s been really rewarding when the new hires tell me how much they’ve learned and how much more confident they are at their job, and getting a small bonus from my boss last quarter in recognition of my efforts was really just the icing on the cake.”
I won’t tell you which response is better from an admissions standpoint, since you can probably figure it out. Remember that business schools care a ton about leadership, teamwork, helping others, and so forth. I think you get my point…hope this helps!
Interesting about the leadership aspect; I’ve always heard that. I’m in SS research and I am the lead analyst so I’m basically a one-man team. I do have prior roles with some team-work, but very few group based projects that I could demonstrate viable leadership roles, so not sure how I’d clear that hurdle.
I’d imagine the main benefit is once it comes time for placement out of school, having the charter will separate you from your classmates. If your coming out of Chicago, Wharton, GSB w/ the Charter I’d imagine the options are bountiful, you’d be giving you employer a lot of confidence that your skills make you useful day 1 on the job.
Also, I took a look at what Systematic wrote and I’m on board with what he said.
CFABLACKBELT, having worked in sell-side equity research for three years myself before moving onto other things, my advice to you would be to think of your “team” as someone broader than your immediate coverage space. Specifically, the way that you work with your clients, institutional salespeople, traders, supervisory analysts, and so forth are all ways that you can potentially be adding value and making the “whole greater than the sum of its parts.” Your “team” is however you define it to be, and if you present it in a compelling fashion as I suggested, you can easily make your team more than what one would traditionally think of in a typical ogranizational sense.
No
Passing L1 guarantees top 5 MBA admission only if you score above 70% in Ethics.
thanks I was really wondering that…
anyway, to add some more context to my question, I do not plan on getting into a top 5 MBA program…maybe top 20-30 if I’m lucky. I just want to get into the best program offering specialization in “corporate finance” that I can. I didn’t think CFA would be a shoe in, but it might show that you have more interest in finance than just the usual BA business degree. The BA in business can signal all sorts of things from… I’m really good at business to I just took this because it hought I should I still dont know what Im doing or want to do… so I was just hoping involving myself in the CFA would show some kind of above and beyond initiative and interest… I don’t assume it’ll get me into stern or hbs
I don’t get why people here are all or nothing about everything. Everyone is so down on the CFA because it wont put you on auto pilot to be the head of GS or CEO of TYCOO… well no shit… but that doesn’t mean it’s not going help get you into some kind of okay job… maybe everybody needs to add more context to questions and answers.
That makes sense. Thanks Numi. In that regard then, I shouldn’t be in too much trouble so long as I articulate my story the correct way.
Also on a side note, I forget are you in NYC? If so, you def should meet us up later this month for the AF social.
Sadly, some admission officers don’t know the CFA or have no idea of the discipline required to pass.
Well, if CFA helps your pre-MBA career, it might indirectly help your MBA admissions chances as a byproduct. Other than that, I doubt that it will help much.